Water level of 91 major reservoirs drops 2%’

New Delhi: The water level of 91 major reservoirs in the country has gone down by two per cent, the Ministry of Water Resources said on Friday.

“The water storage available in 91 major reservoirs of the country for the week ending on April 20, 2017 was 46.02 billion cubic metres (BCM) which is 29 per cent of total storage capacity of these reservoirs. This percentage was at 31 for the week ending on April 13, 2017,” the ministry said in an official statement.

It further said that the level of April 20, 2017 was 133 per cent of the storage of corresponding period of 2015-2016 and 106 per cent of storage of average of last ten years.

The total storage capacity of these 91 reservoirs is 157.799 BCM which is about 62 per cent of the total storage capacity of 253.388 BCM which is estimated to have been created in the country.

Thirty-seven reservoirs out of these 91 have hydropower benefit with installed capacity of more than 60 megawatt.

Storage in the northern region during current year is better than the states having better storage than last year are Punjab, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana.

States having lesser storage than last year are Himachal Pradesh, Tripura, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.